IN THIS SECTION

One of the most radical, far-sighted and articulate early feminists, Matilda Joslyn Gage was deliberately written out of history after her death in 1898 by an increasingly conservative suffrage movement. Equal in importance to Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Gage is all but unknown today. Efforts are under way to correct that.

The Matilda Joslyn Gage Foundation took root in 2000 when Sally Roesch Wagner, the leading authority on Gage, brought together a nationwide network of diverse people with a common goal: to bring this vitally important suffragist back to her rightful place in history.

The Foundation is dedicated not only to educating current and future generations about the lifelong work of this major woman’s rights thinker, author and activist, but also its power to drive contemporary social change.

While restoring knowledge of Gage’s contributions, which continue to be of great relevance today, the Gage Foundation (soon to be called the Gage Center) is also an educational resource for discussion and dialogue about the human rights issues to which she dedicated her life.

“We know we are right; we know we shall be successful,
we know the day is not far distant, when this government and the world
will acknowledge the exact and permanent political equality of man and woman …”

– Matilda Joslyn Gage

Gage stood for:

Gage opposed:

Egalitarianism

Peace and justice for all

Women’s rights / human rights

Separation of church and state

Religious freedom

Treaty rights and Native Sovereignty

A woman’s right to her own body

Helping slaves to freedom on the Underground Railroad

Breaking the law to create justice

Suppression of truth

Degradation of women

Double standards

Church abuse of power

Religious fundamentalism

Forcing citizenship on Native men

Trafficking in women

Slavery and servitude of condition, denying any group their rights

Denying women the right to vote

“When all humanity works for humanity, when the life-business of men and women
becomes one united partnership in all matters which concern each,
when neither sex, race, color, or previous condition
is held as a bar to the exercise of human faculties,
the world will hold in its hands the promise of a millennium
which will work out its own fulfillment.”